Moingona, Iowa (July 6, 1881)

Fifteen-year-old Kate Shelley pulled the sheets from the line. A terrible storm was coming. Kate could feel it in the air. A cold wind rose as she carried the heavy basket back to the house. Black clouds rolled in. The sky grew dark.


Kate stood at the kusina window with her younger sisters and brother. They saw lightning flash. They heard thunder crack in the hills. Then the rain came.
As the rain poured down, they watched the water rising in Honey Creek. Soon it overflowed its banks and flooded part of the yard.
"I'm going to let the mga hayop out of the barn," Kate...

"How was your class trip to the farm?"

"Oh…boring…kind of dull…until the cow started crying."


"A cow…crying?"
"Yeah, you see, a haystack fell on her."

"But a haystack doesn’t just fall over."


"It does if a farmer crashes into it with his tractor."
"Oh, come on, a farmer wouldn’t do that."
"He would if were too busy yelling at the pigs to get off our school bus."


"What were the pigs doing on the bus?"
"Eating our lunches."


"Why were they eating your lunches?"
"Because we threw their mais at each other, and they didn't have anything else to eat."
"Well, that makes sense, but why were you throwing...

This is the great Kapiti Plain, all fresh and green from the African rains
A sea of damo for the ground birds to nest in, and patches of shade for wild creatures to rest in;
With acacia trees for giraffes to browse on, and damo for herdsmen to pasture their cows on.

But one taon the rains were so very belated, that all of the big wild creatures migrated.
The Ki-pat helped to end that terrible drought, and this story tells how it all came about!

This is the cloud, all heavy with rain, that shadowed the ground on Kapiti Plain.

This is the grass, all brown and dead, that needed the rain from the cloud...

One araw last spring, Louis, a butcher, turned into a fish. Silvery scales. Big lips. A tail. A salmon.


Louis did not lead, before this, an unusual life. His grandfather was a butcher. His father was a butcher. So, Louis was a butcher. He had a small tindahan on Flatbush. Steady customers. Good meat. He was always friendly, always helpful, a wonderful guy.


But Louis was not a happy man. He hated meat. From the time he was a little boy he was always surrounded sa pamamagitan ng meat. Whenever he would visit his grandfather on Sundays it was always, “Louis, my paborito grandson. What a good boy. Here’s a hotdog.”...